Things we get out of roleplaying

[Peter Knutsen]

Originally Posted by johndallman

I started thinking about this because of the latest Parkour thread in the GURPS forum, which baffled me. I can see why it might be a useful ability, but some of the commenters seemed to want it as the centre of character design, the defining aspect of the character. There was something there I wasn't getting in terms of the rewards of the game.

The parkour thing is interesting.

Because do you need parkour as a thing in the game rules? More importantly, do you need parkour as a thing in the character creation game rules?

Or can you do it with just having skills like Acrobatics and Climbing, or Jumping and Climbing, or all three, which have been traditional to have in RPGs for a long time? Does that produce the effect?

Or do you need slightly more?

GURPS has Techniques. You can buy the Acrobatics and Climbing skills, and then enhance them further, fairly cheaply, with a couple of Techniques that means they count as, e.g., 2 higher when used for parkour-type things.

Same in Sagatafl, any skill you train to level 1 is entitled to a free specialziation for which it counts as being 1 higher (exactly as in Ars Magica, and AFAIK earlier versions of Storyteller, before they changed to something more complicated). So you can buy Climbing (Parkour) 5, meaning you climb at 5 except when you do parkour you climb at 6, and same with Acrobatics (Parkour) 5.

Or you can do it slightly differently, because Sagatafl ascribes great importance to terrain types (it matters a lot where you are, and it matters a lot how good you are at coping with where you are).

All Wilderness skills and some movement skills (very much including Climbing, and it makes sense to do that for Acrobatics too, and perhaps Jumping) are "capped" by the relevant Terrain skill. Survival is capped harshly at x1.5, so e.g. if your Terrain: Urban skill is 4 then if your Survival skill is 7 or more, it still only fuctions as if it was 6, as long as you are in an Urban area. Camping is capped at x2.5, most other skills are capped by Terrain at x2.

So, one way to represent parkour is by taking a fairly high level in the Terrain: Urban skill, and then choose Urban as your specialziation for Climbing, Acrobatics and Jumping (choosing a terrain type as your specialization is 100% explicitly legal).



The question is, is that enough? Does it create the "strong concept" (notice I don't say high concept, because as I've said before, I dislike that) of the characer being able to do parkour? Being observably a parkourist, from inside the world, in the eyes of the other characters?

Some years ago, I tried to enumerare various parkour movement-based options, because that would fit very well with Sagatafl's movement system, based on discrete Move Actions that are defined (in part) by distance (how many hx you move per Move Action) and by time (how many Action Points it costs to perform the Move Action). But I ended up with a farly large amount of distinct moves, which wasn't what I liked.

There's also the search-and-handling issue.

If the GM handles it as a speshul unique case, every time your parkour expert character wants to do a parkour move (possibly more than one such move per combat Round, on average!), and the GM has to sit there and think about it, in a responsive re-active fashion, every time, it's going to slow the game down a lot. The player who has the parkour character risks feeling under a lot of (real or perceived - the difference doesn't matter) social pressure to stop doing parkour moves, because they consume to much of the GM's brain power.

Much better to have the things thought through prior to gamestart, when there is time to do a good and comprehensive job of it. Much better to pre-think it. Ahead of the specific situation.

In the end I'll probably just define parkour as some binary skills, of a particularly "controlled" category known as Stunts, that reduces the normally freakily high Roll Difficulty of parkour moves to something that can be managed. Worst case is just one Stunt per skill, Parkour Climb (a particularly vigorously, very strenous (costs Combat Fatigue Points) but also very efficient way to climb), Parkour Acrobatics and probably Parkour Jumping too. Maybe Parkour Architecture too, to be able to "anticipate" architectural features.

Or if I can boil it down to a few moves, no more than 7, preferably only 4 or 5, those will be the Stunts instead.



Either way, I definitely think that parkour should be a martial art, in any RPG system that has anything like defined or combined martial arts. It ought to have been included in GURPS Martial Arts for 4th Edition. And it fits nicely into Sagatafl's concept of Martial Arts (as a recommended combination of Stunts), so will be one there.

Note, though, that having parkour as a martial art isn't the same as saying that it needs very detailed rules. In Spycraft 2.0, you define a martial art by a combination of Feats. The core book has a sidebarboxythingie that give suggestions for which feats to combine to approximate styles such as judo, taekwondo, karate, kung fu and aikido. It wouldn't surprise me if the Feats necessary to approximate parkour, at least in a primitive fashion, are already there in the Spycraft 2.0 core book. Or in "World on Fire". And that if a couple more custom Feats are added, parkour can be simulated fairly well in Spycraft 2.0.